It's Brittany, Bitch | Ερις (eristic) wrote in paxletalelogs, @ 2017-02-26 20:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | ares, eris |
4 minutes to save the world
Who: Daniel & BB.
What: BB and Daniel put their daring plan to investigate their dream into action.
Where: Pax Letale lobby and then the secret room.
When: Afternoon.
BB tore into her apartment, throwing her journalist kit down onto her worn kitchen table, and then immediately exited with nothing but her phone, going next door to Daniel's apartment. She'd just finished researching another article, doing work at the local library, and in doing so had come across a few interesting tidbits related to their apartment complex. She banged on Daniel's door as she always did, uncaring if anyone else was within and unthinking with regard to the device in her hand.
"Daniel! Dannniiieelll, open up!"
Her beating echoed into the room, carrying easily into the kitchen where he had just cracked open a beer. Frigid peach lambic still in hand, he moved to open the door, letting it swing wide for her to enter as she pleased.
"What's up?" he asked, already turning away, disappearing into the kitchen. He was elbow-deep in the fridge when he looked back at her. "Beer?"
She stepped into his apartment almost at the same time as he opened the door, flowing into the space as though she owned it. She spun around, her hair almost wafting like a small cloud in her wake.
"What? Oh, sure, yeah. Look, remember how we talked getting into that room? I think we need to do it, like, sooner rather than later." BB walked over to Daniel's table, pulling out a chair and seating herself, leaning over the tabletop in her excitement. "I was just at the library, doing research for this other thing," she swiped her hand to the side, dismissing the detail, "and I looked a little into this apartment and you would not believe the shit that used to happen here."
"What are you talkin' about?" He returned with a second lambic, this one raspberry, and set both down in front of her. "What 'other thing' and what used to happen here? I thought this place was really new?"
BB wrapped a greedy hand around the glass, pulling it toward herself; her attention, however, was fully fixed on Daniel's now that she had the full of it.
"Oh no, no no no," she replied, her free hand waving in the air. "They revamped the building this was before. Like, you didn't read anything about this place? At all? Do you also go running at night with earbuds in East L.A. hoping to get mugged?
"Anyway," she continued with a shrug as he flipped her off, taking a quick sip of the beer and glancing at it with new appreciation, "Oh, this is good. Anyway, yeah, no, this place was an apartment complex five years ago; before that it was a hotel. But back to the original apartment complex.I guess it's switched hands a lot, but get this: the last management company that owned it lost it because there was a murder." BB was nearly prostrated on the table, leaning so far forward in anticipation of Daniel's reaction that she'd all but climbed atop it.
Daniel's brow furrowed; his lips formed a little frown around the tip of his bottle. "A murder? That sounds… that's kind of crazy. Don't they have to tell you that when you sign the lease? I thought that was a law." He set his bottle down, shaking his head. "Where's your sources? Seriously, I did read a little, but I didn't see anything like that."
BB rolled her eyes, wiggling back into her seat a little. "OK, well, it wasn't like in the building, but a tenant was killed. You know that little island out in the bay? The one the marina patrol keeps everybody away from? Apparently she was killed out there, yeah, a woman from here. But the fun doesn't stop there," she continued, pushing her beer to her other hand to dial something into her phone's browser. She pushed it across the table to him.
"But even before that, people reported a lot of weird things happening. Sounds like they were hallucinating or something, but like...floors changing, weird gifts, even someone's dog went missing."
He plucked the phone up from the table, thumbing over the screen to scroll down through the page. "I dunno, BB," he mumbled. "That kinda sounds like every Lifetime movie ever. Some psycho gets obsessed with a girl, starts bringing her presents, escalates, kills her…" He shrugged, and shook his head. "I mean it's awful, I'm not sayin' it's not, but…" His brow furrowed as he took another sip. "Wait, floors changing, what d'you mean? Like their apartments got moved around, or remodeling, or what, exactly?"
BB shrugged. "Sounded like redecorating to me, but like...museum shit. Someone hauling in a shitton of sand, or turning the A/C way up and making icicles on the ceiling. That's why I said maybe they were all stoned, because that sounds like a fuckton of effort and money to go to, just to mess with a bunch of people.
"But doesn't that, you know, sound weird? Like, dream sharing weird?"
He scrolled down only twice more. There was nothing conclusive, but there was enough to back her up; enough to be disconcerting, at the very least. He set the phone down, pushing it back to her with his fingertips, as though it was hot to the touch. "Yeah, it's pretty fuckin' weird. Why would anybody do that? I mean... " He gestured with his free hand, his thumbnail picking at the label of his beer. "Why? You're right, that's a shitload of effort, and I dunno what it accomplishes other than makin' your tenants want to peace out."
He took a drink, shaking his head all the while. "So what's your plan, then. Saunter down to the lobby and ask Stephan what's up?"
BB nodded, her shoulders rolling in uncertainty. "Well, no, nothing that blatant. Like what we said before. You distract, I'll sneak. I am capable of it, contrary to popular belief. Or do you wanna try fitting your massive bulk behind his tiny ass desk?" She arched a brow in his direction, waiting for the inevitable agreement.
"Massive? C'mon, now." He sighed down into the glass bottle. "Fine. You sneak. I'll distract. I can do that. So when's this plan--" He pointed the bottle's neck at her. "--and I'm not sayin' it is actually anything like a real, actual plan, just an attempt at one… when's this thing goin' down?"
Though she rolled her eyes, she too knew well that this was less of a plan than a mishmash of very, very loose ideas, though that was not to say that such things had not served her well before. She bit her lip, grinning at him, the very picture of 'you're not going to like this.'
"Like, right now? Or are you busy? I mean..." BB made a show of glancing around his apartment, doubly and triply underlining the fact that it was oh-so very empty. "It's not like you've got a whole lot going on right now. Or is Chris hiding in a closet somewhere?"
His lips thinned to a tight line, mirrored in the furrow of his brow. "I dunno what you're talkin' about," he said. "And you know I'm not busy or you wouldn't have come by." He sighed heavily. "All right. Are any of those cats still around? That might be a good distraction. I mean I guess I could rely on my masculine wiles."
"Mhm," she replied, looking too much like a cat that had caught a canary. In the next beat, she let it go. "And yeah, I'm pretty sure Stephan would hit that like a sack of bricks hitting one of those cats." Daniel snorted laughing, and set his lambic aside for good this time.
"I think most of them are gone; animal control came around the other day, or at least I think I saw a truck. But who knows, they showed up outta fuckin' nowhere, so maybe they'll be back." BB took another swig of the alcoholic beverage Daniel had provided, then another, as though to polish off the rest of whatever courage she was trying to drum up. Then she put her hands on the tabletop and pushed herself to standing.
"Shall we?"
His nod was curt and decisive. He rose from the table, leaving the bottle where it sat as he searched for his boots. He slid them on while standing by the door, visibly more eager about this plan than he wanted to let on. "How much time will you need? Like, a couple minutes, ten… what?"
BB shrugged. "Maybe, maybe even less; depends on what kind of lock, if any, they've got on the door. I'll have to go through the drawers and see what kind of keys I can find." She followed Daniel out into their shared hallway, glancing up and down as though she was already anxious about being caught.
He locked the apartment door behind them and dropped his keys into his pocket. He wet his lips, still tasting vaguely of peach. He had provided countless distractions before; all that truly remained was to determine which page of his vast playbook would work best against the eagle-eyed concierge.
Together they moved down the hallway. "Maybe if you can just get him outside? I could always hit a car, start a car alarm...?" She stopped them both in front of the elevator. "Look, how about this. You go down in the elevator first. I'm gonna go down by the stairs, so he doesn't know I'm there. You text me once you've gotten him far away enough from the desk that I can sneak out of the stairwell and head for the door. OK?"
"Perfect," he said. "See you down there."
He nodded to her and entered the elevator, leaning against the back wall of the car on the short ride down. In that brief span, he pulled up BB's number on his phone, typing a quick text out to her and leaving it in draft. A couple of small motions and he could have the text sent, and hopefully Stephan would be none the wiser. The phone was back in his pocket by the time he stepped off the elevator and into the lobby. He waved cheerfully at Stephan, making a beeline for the concierge's desk.
"Stephan!" he called. He spread his arms wide as he approached the desk. "Just the man I wanted to see. You're a sight for sore eyes…"
Stephan arched a penciled brow, looking up from a battered, broken-spined copy of The Mirror Empire. "Am I."
"You are. Before I put in a work order or anything I wanna make sure I'm not imaginin' shit. I thought y'all got rid of the cats but I swear to God it sounds like there's one stuck in the wall or the fence or somethin' outside, under my window." He waved him over. "Come outside with me? I wanna check it out with a second set of eyes. And ears."
BB, meanwhile, stuck to her part of the plan. Once Daniel was in the elevator, she went to the stairs, moving down them as quietly as she could. Of course, this meant that every step sounded far louder than it should have, her sneakers on the concrete reverberating through the dead air of the stairwell. She thanked several deities a few times over for the fact that she only lived on the second floor, and soon enough she was at the exit to both the lobby and the outdoors. A slight attempt to press on ear to the door leading into the lobby provided no fruit, the thick steel silencing any and all conversation that might've been coming from within.
Instead, BB looked to her phone, the bright blue glow cast over her face underlining her anticipation. The minute that passed might have felt like an hour, but soon enough the screen lit up, Daniel's pre-typed message at last coming through.
got him
Outside, Daniel and Stephan could just barely be made out, making their way around to the back of the building, Daniel was gesticulating wildly, gesturing toward a row of boxwoods under which no cat -- or indeed, anything at all -- rested.
BB jabbed the metal bar that allowed her access into the lobby, pausing only for a moment to peer outside and watch as they disappeared. Once they were gone, she all but ran toward the concierge desk. Sliding behind it like a runner hitting home before the ball could reach them, she glanced at its contents. It was like any other normal desk; a plethora of drawers, some square and some rectangular. BB quietly swore at the fact that all of them were unlabeled, apparently sorted by some system that only Stephan was privy to. A few of them had locks; they were larger, and she assumed for filing. That wouldn't be of any help, so she focused on the smaller ones, pulling them open only to reveal staplers, tape, pens, unfilled out forms and pamphlets for the apartment complex.
She glanced at the door, at the long windows looking outside into the bright day, wondering how much longer she had. In what was either desperation or a wise preemptive strike, Daniel had slid an arm around Stephan's shoulders. Stephan was peering into the bushes for a stray cat that wasn't there; he did not seem particularly perturbed by Daniel's means of distraction.
Daniel's hand slipped into his pocket as he gestured again. He drew Stephan down to peer below the hedge. A few moments later, BB received a text:
!!!
"Shit," she muttered to herself, pulling drawers out faster, leaving them undone. Finally, her search was rewarded; two extra sets of keys were laid out in front of her, undoubtedly exact copies of the one Stephan always had hanging from his belt. BB snatched one up, turning to the door behind her, and furiously started trying to put keys in the doorknob to undo the lock.
There had to have been 20 keys or more on the ring alone; not enough for copies of every apartment in the building, but far more than she'd expect for any measure of maintenance. By the time she was on the seventh key, however, the door suddenly popped open, and she snuck inside its dark interior. One hand to the wall kept her near the slim slice of light that denoted where the door was, and another allowed her to flick a switch to reveal several rows of tall shelves, exactly like the ones in the dream she and Daniel had shared. BB's eyes went wide as she moved from shelf to shelf, noting boxer gloves, a belt, musical instruments, a huge sampling of sundry items more than likely left behind by past tenants. Each was meticulously labeled with a piece of paper attached to a string tied onto the item.
BB took a step forward, glass suddenly crunching underfoot. She looked down, pushing slivers away, noting where some of the shelves had been pushed back into place, the rings of dust around their foundations disturbed. Knowing her time was running short, BB raised her phone and snapped a few quick photos; and then, on top of that, she reached for the first item that might come to hand, wrapped clenching fingers around it, and snapped the light off. She fumbled with the keys for a moment, trying to remember which one was responsible for locking this particular door, glancing at the entryway and praying that Daniel and Stephan didn't appear.
A click answered her prayers, and a quick test of the door showed that it was sealed. BB turned, making sure all the desk drawers were shut, and then moved around the desk and back to the stairwell, tucking herself behind the door just as she heard Stephan make his way back into the lobby.
"Well I'll let you know if I hear anything else," Daniel was saying. "I really do think one's stuck in that tree or somethin'. I don't wanna call animal control cos you know they'll just put the thing down…"
His hands shoved into his pockets, Daniel craned his neck to see around the concierge desk. He had not bought as much time as he had hoped, but he saw no sign of BB or whatever progress she had made. He hoped that boded well. For his part, Stephan cast a questioning look around his workspace, gold-limned eyes narrowing as he searched for anything out of place. Daniel swiped his tongue across his lips, already slowly edging his way back toward the elevators.
"If you hear anything, lemme know? I'm just curious…" '
Stephan seemed disinclined to answer, and Daniel had no desire to stick around. He slipped into the elevator and began immediately pressing the button to the second floor, all the while checking his phone for any message from BB.
@ my apartment
BB had quickly retreated up the stairs, taking the keys, photos, and random item she'd stolen from the room directly to her unit. Her hands shook as she opened up the door, and she dumped the lot on her kitchen table without fully examining them. Then her eyes fell on the thing she'd grabbed: a bloody dog collar, a silver coin presenting the name Jack. Her lips curled in disgust.
Daniel entered the apartment without so much as a knock, considering her text invitation enough. "What'd you find?" he asked, pushing the door closed behind him. He wrinkled his nose at the sight of the collar. He stopped in front of the table. He reached out, prodding the least bloody portion of the fabric. "What the shit is that? I mean… why would they have that back there?"
He arched one dark brow. "And uh. Did it look like we remem-- um, dreamed?"
"Yeah," BB replied, the monosyllabic word uncharacteristic for her. She moved forward and grabbed her phone from the table top, opening the camera files and handing it off to Daniel. "Don't you remember? We fucking touched that thing in the dream. I tossed it to you. It..." She shook her head, her brow furrowing. "I've never had a pet fish in my life, let alone a goddamn dog, but there's something about that damn thing that seems too fuckin' familiar." She crossed her arms over her chest, deeply uncomfortable even with the success of their mission.
He thumbed through the pictures. His frown and the furrow in his brow both deepened with every one. He nodded, though his expression showed plainly how little he cared to admit these things. "Yeah, I… I dunno, BB. That isn't the first weird, shared dream I've had here, but it's definitely the only one I can… confirm. This shit really happened, BB. It did. What do we do with that?"
BB shook her head, shrugging. Then she suddenly surged forward, grabbing up the dog collar and putting it in her kitchen's junk drawer. Perhaps unshockingly, it would likely be the least odd item found within, but for the moment, BB was glad to have it out of sight, thus out of mind. She looked back to Daniel and shrugged again.
"I dunno, it's not like we can go to the cops. Ooo, we found this weird room that we think we were drugged into," she said, mimicking a tone of voice higher pitched than her own. "I guess... I guess we just sit on it for now. Watch and wait, you know?" She held out her hand for her phone. "And you never said you had a dream with someone else. Who? Was it in the same room?"
Daniel's hand froze in the middle of passing her the phone. His fingers brushed hers lightly as he dropped it into her hand, then quickly drew away. "What? No. No, I just had a dream and I thought somebody from the building was in it, and h-- they were. That's it. Not the same room at all. Not even a room honestly, but like… a pond? Lake? Somethin'."
BB's eyes narrowed, unhappy with his poor attempt at evasion. "Dude, come on. We're trying to figure out what's going on here, and you're keeping shit from me? I just risked my goddamn lease so we could find out if we were fucking crazy or if this is even real. What, did someone jerk you off or something in la la land?" The words were meant to be sarcastic, but her biting tone removed any chance of humor.
"...kinda?" He shrugged, shoulders and palms rising as one. His look of innocence was even more poorly executed than his evasion. "It doesn't matter. Really. It's just a weird dream, and apparently we both had it, which is even weirder. That's it. I'm not hidin' a goddamn thing from you." Other than his dream-partner's name, of course; but he hoped this was an omission BB could understand.
She hefted a large sigh that made her chest noticeably expand and retract, her annoyance with her friend clear.
"Fine. Whatever. I don't really care right now. I guess we just...yeah. I mean, we've got nothing else to go with, and as far as I know, you and I are the only crazy people in the building aside from your mystery hooker blow job person." BB thrust her arms down by her sides, moving to another drawer on far side of her kitchen. She withdrew a plastic baggie holding five blunts, and shook it in Daniel's direction. "I don't know about you, but I could use some serious chill time right now. Also, I didn't get to finish my beer, so we're going back to your place to spark up."
"Fuck yeah we are," he said. A broad grin split his face. His earlier concerns were forgotten; she did not seem willing to pursue the dream just yet, and her alternate plan would put them both in better spirits. He motioned to her, already on his way out the door, to where their beers and a refrigerator full of more within their easy reach. The mystery could wait, for now.